When he became conscious again, he stared around him in amazement. This was a miracle! He was far down the sloping lawn of the Havermann grounds, almost to the curb. He had no memory of opening the front door, getting down off the porch, or inching across the turf.

Could someone—Harry? Benny?—have found him, helped him? He looked all around, but he was alone. Back across the shadowed lawns, the Havermann house looked tall and lonely. The front door stood open, the beams of the light in the bracket shone out upon the porch. The rest of the place was dark.

He felt a renewal of confidence and strength. He pulled himself to his knees, and then on hands and knees he traversed the two blocks, long vacant blocks, to the boulevard. And then it was time to rise up and to walk.

He squeezed himself over against a building, out of the light, and forced his body slowly upward. There were strangenesses: odd tremors and loosened joints and a tearing sensation all through the middle of his lungs, as if his lungs were made of tissue paper and the breath trapped in them was forcing a hole slowly wider and wider. Sweat came out all over him; he tottered off balance; a great roaring filled his ears.

“Walk, feet.” Had he said it aloud? No matter. There was no one about now; the drugstore had closed. Passing, he could see inside it, the night light above the prescription counter glowing ruby red in an enormous jar of colored liquid. And then by another miracle he was at the car. He slid inside and fell across the seat.

A long while later he heard a whispering voice. It insinuated itself into his brain, rousing him from the compulsion to sleep.

“Hey! Hey! Can you sit up? Look, are there any cops around here?”

Tom listened dreamily to the voice.

“Who shot you?”

Tom said, in his mind, “The little bastard threw a handful of bullets at me—just threw them, mind you—and the damned things went all the way in, exactly as if he had used a gun. It was remarkable, very remarkable.” In his dream, then, he was telling this to a screw he had known in prison, and in reply the screw, who had always been short-tempered, raised an enormous leg and kicked him between the shoulder blades and a long quivering slice of pain ran through his body from back to front. That’ll teach me to pass the time of day with a goddamn screw, Tom said to himself in his mind. But then, anyway, he went on explaining: “And I didn’t even see him raise his arm. What I saw, it seemed he just had his finger pointed at me and . . . zzzzzz! Like bees!”

“For God’s sake, are you laughing?” cried the whispering voice.